With the Yes camp: As low-key referendum campaign has been trying to compete fir the attention of a distracted electorate, writes Carl O'Brien
The middle-aged mother in the Dublin shopping centre is insistent she is aware of the issues at stake in the citizenship referendum.
"Yes, I know all about it," she says assertively, not bothering to scan the Yes vote leaflet handed to her by Fianna Fáil's Mary Hanafin. "But . . ." she says, her voice trailing off, "the Yes vote is about changing the way it is, or is that the No vote?"
Ms Hanafin, accompanied by two other campaigners on a quiet evening in Blackrock's Frascati shopping centre, explains that a Yes vote will change the entitlement to citizenship. "That's fine so," the mother says. "It's not really a black-and-white issue, is it? If that's the right word to use."
The confusion is a recurring theme in a largely low-key referendum campaign which has been trying to compete with local and European elections for the attention of a distracted electorate.
Just a fraction of political party budgets are being directed at the campaign. Few, if any, parties are actually launching separate door-to-door campaigns on the issue. And the late decision whether to hold the vote means much party literature has only been finalised in recent days.
"It is very low-key, but it doesn't have the same emotion as in other referendums," says Ms Hanafin. "When you raise it on the doorstep people don't always know what it's all about."
While the rush to hold the referendum was one of the criticisms levelled at the Government, Ms Hanafin says confusion occurs no matter how much debate has been devoted to an issue.
"In every referendum people tend to confuse the issues," says Ms Hanafin. "In the Nice referendum it was the same. People often vote for different reasons."
While the citizenship issue died down somewhat in recent weeks, this week it began to be heard once again amid the clamour of other elections campaigns.
The recently-launched Fianna Fáil campaign is for "common sense" citizenship and is backed up by a leaflet campaign, which will see 1.6 million delivered to every home in the country, along with 10,000 posters.
Fine Gael, which agrees with the amendment in principle, is not launching a campaign at all.
Labour is launching a visible No campaign backed up by thousands of posters, while the Progressive Democrats are spending €40,000 on leaflets and posters.
The Greens and Sinn Féin have also launched their campaigns in recent days with thousands of leaflets outlining the reasons for a No vote.
Over in the Merrion Shopping Centre in Ballsbridge, where Labour's Dublin MEP candidate Ms Ivana Bacik is campaigning for a No vote, there is also some doubt over the issue at stake in the referendum.
Ms Nora Breen (87), a local resident, is accosted as she wheels her shopping trolley out of the centre. "Is this for the people coming in or out of the country?" she asks Ms Bacik, who briefly details what the referendum is about.
"If it wasn't for some of the immigrants, I wouldn't be here today," Ms Breen responds, voicing her support for a No vote.
"I had a Chinese woman who helped me in the house. She was lovely. They are really terrific."
Ms Bacik says she is coming across people who are voting different ways for a whole range of reasons, sometimes rational, sometimes emotional, sometimes political.
"Funnily enough I'm getting a lot of disgruntled Fine Gael voters who are angry with the party stance. Others are voting for it because they want less immigrants or asylum-seekers. There are lots of reasons."
She is reluctant to label some of the motivation behind the Yes vote as racist, as other No campaigners have, and says some voters are driven more by a "passive intolerance" against immigration-related issues.
Back in the Frascati centre, the evening shoppers stopping to talk to Ms Hanafin are overwhelmingly Yes voters who agree with closing off abuse of the citizenship loophole, as she describes it.
As the Fianna Fáil chief whip finishes up for the night, she points out that the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown area generally bucks national trends, whether in terms of turnout or voting patterns.
"In Nice we had the highest Yes vote and the highest percentage turnout. I'm sure this time there will be records broken again," she says smiling, before clarifying, "for the right reasons, of course."